“Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.”

— E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951, Cambridge

About E. M. Forster

1879 – 1970

English novelist, author of "A Room with a View" and "A Passage to India".

“Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.”

“Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it.”

“Poetry is a spirit; and they that would worship it must worship in spirit and in truth.”

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

“It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?”

“In theory there is nothing to hinder our following what we are taught; but in life there are many things to draw us aside.”

“If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces.”

“That which makes the man no worse than he was makes his life no worse: it has no power to harm, without or within.”

“Always take the short cut; and that is the rational one. Therefore say and do everything according to soundest reason.”